I am happy that my truck was originally Harvester Red, which seems honest enough and was in fact used to repaint International tractors when there was trouble with Tractor Red in 1953. But this yellow paint—for a moment I thought maybe it was the Apache Yellow and these were not original doors, but it’s only on the main panel and doesn’t extend all the way up to the windows or back to the trailing edge of the door, and the Harvester Red is still under there, so that’s not it—must have been slapped on there by somebody sometime for some reason. I go around to the other door and find the same thing. I come back around and try a while longer to sand the first door, but the yellow paint just keeps gumming everything up, so I leave it and move to a fender.
I run the grinder late into the night. It is a good thing, to work with your muscles, to feel the grit on your skin and the vibration in your bones. The goggles and the mask and the earplugs create a silent core at the center of the noise and dust, and I relive the kiss from the night before, again and again, around and around.
I wish I had thick beautiful hair the same way I wish I was six-foot-two with abs. I’m not, and so it goes. I’m okay with it, but you won’t hear me buying into that whole bald-is-beautiful thing, which is the follicular equivalent of Size Doesn’t Matter. You can only invoke Sean Connery so many times. And there are other problems. In the past week, I gouged my head on a protruding roofing nail in the garage and slammed my skull into a copper pipe in the basement. I did the usual head-clutching curse dance. I have been doing this sort of thing for years and no one the wiser. But this week two people asked me how I hurt myself. I was baffled until I got to a mirror. Without hair cover, two prominent scabs announce to all the world that I am terminally clumsy.
If a simple, safe, and affordable baldness cure comes along, I’m interested, and willing to hasten that cure by offering my remaining hair to science. In particular, three specific hairs composing a paltry little thicket just one-half inch south of my hairline. (Three-quarters of an inch, perhaps, by the time you read this, as in my case the term hairline represents the optimistic characterization of what has become a frankly hazy demarcation in transitus.) Like ship masts dwindling beyond the curve of the earth, the bulk of my hair is receding along the horizon of my bean, and yet this rebellious little trio stands fast, each strand apparently bald-proof. Why do they survive where so many have fallen? It strikes me that the holy grail of hair loss—a cure for baldness—may be woven in their DNA. I plan to alert the proper scientific authorities. Of course I hope to turn a buck. As such, I shall convene my accountant, my barber, my bioethicist, and a coven of intellectual property lawyers to compose a contract making all three strands available for lease, individually or as a package deal useful in conducting control group studies. Scientists in Pennsylvania recently announced that they were able to grow hair on a bald mouse using implanted stem cells. More than any time in our history, it seems reasonable to believe that a legitimate cure for hair loss is on the horizon, and my three hairs are prepared to provide the missing link.
As far as my cowlick, I recall it fondly. As of this writing, a little vestige remains. For years I cursed the genes that set me up with a patch of hair that ran against the grain, little knowing that complete follicular failure was percolating in those same genes, and had been since the moment I was conceived. From the get-go, my hair was programmed to fall out. One is grateful this so rarely happens with the pancreas or the eyeballs.
By the time I cut it, I wasn’t fussing with my hair much anymore, but now my beauty regimen is really streamlined. No need to use conditioner. No need to blow it dry. No need for combs. No hair in my eyes no matter which way the wind blows. Six minibottles of motel shampoo and I am ready to go for the year. I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian sect that not only frowned on vanity but viewed long hair on a man as sinful. My hair experimentation was just that—experimentation, not rebellion—but members of the church still saw it as a form of defiance. I left the church long ago. In that sense, my going bald may have put me on the path to redemption.
I work the sanding wheel late into the night, clearing a larger and larger patch in the fender, which gleams ever more silver. Now and then I take a break to stoke the fire and rest in the orange chair. I wonder if I am about to introduce another woman to my family only to have them inquire after her fruitlessly a few months from now. I have never surrendered to cynicism, and I don’t intend to start now, but over the past twenty-two years, certain patterns have been established.
I mailed a note to Anneliese today. Told her how much I enjoyed the evening. Made a wry comment about the pad thai. I’ve always been one for writing follow-up notes, probably because I’m so mumbly in the moment. For all my failed relationships, I can say I have never written a love letter I didn’t mean.
And I have never written one I could bear to go back and read.
CHAPTER 6
MAY
I AM EAGER TO PLANT the garden, but my mother, wise after decades of fickle springs, tells me to wait. Let the ground warm a bit more, she says. For now my seedlings will remain under their lamps.
It is still early days with Anneliese, but so far, so good. I went to her house for a sit-down dinner with several of her friends. While the food was being prepared, I joined Anneliese’s daughter Amy in the living room. We set up a corral on the carpet and she instructed me in the choreography of plastic horses. I threw myself into the role, making clipclop noises and nickering in the way I thought a plastic horse might do. Things were going swimmingly and we were smiling broadly when Amy froze her horse in mid-canter and said, “You have funny teeth.”
Well, fair enough. I have a gap between my incisors that runs about an eighth of an inch. Officially, this is called a diastema. Madonna has one. So does David Letterman. Ditto the astounding Lauren Hutton. Sometimes I wear a T-shirt that says, I’M GAP-TOOTHED, AND I VOTE! and you better believe it. Because of the diastema, I can spit water like a human Super Soaker. When the time is right, I will show this trick to Amy and perhaps win her love forever.
As far as the community is concerned, Anneliese and I had our official coming-out party as a couple when we dined together at the recent New Auburn Area Fire Department annual chicken barbecue dinner. Ostensibly a fund-raiser, the chicken dinner generates a few hundred bucks for our department every year, but the main purpose of having it is to have it. Along about mid-morning we drive all the rigs out of the fire hall and park them in a row along the street so folks can gawk at them on the way in. Next we take to the empty truck bays with a garden hose and push brooms, sweeping up the grit and sluicing it down the cast-iron drain grates. When the floor is clean we rummage around in the storage racks at the back of the hall until we find the spray-painted plywood signs that say CHICKEN B-B-Q 4–8 PM FIRE HALL. A couple of the guys toss the signs in a pickup and run around town planting them at strategic intersections—one out by the freeway exit, one by the stop sign just past the railroad tracks, and one up where Elm Street hits Old Highwy 53, just up from the fire hall. We used to put a sign in the parking lot of St. Jude’s to catch all the Saturday-afternoon Catholics, but since Bishop Burke closed the church, that demographic is lost. There was some protest over the closing and even television cameras, but Bishop Burke is not one to trifle. I went to the final service just to show solidarity for my Catholic friends—the ones who tithed this modest building into existence and regularly opened their doors to people of other faiths when room was needed (including my brother, on the day he buried his first wife). Bishop Burke looked a little pinched, but he did not waver. That boy is going places.
Next come out the folding tables and chairs. Over in a building on Pine Street they have a machine that converts plastic beads into plastic tablecloths for Wal-Mart, and they give us as much as we need, as well as cardboard barrels for the trash. We tape the tablecloths to the underside of the table, and set each table with a bowl of sugar packets and creamer, as well as a salt-and-pepper set, the ones sold in a shrink-
wrapped two-pack and fitted with plastic tops that allow you to select “pour” or “sprinkle” with a twist of your fingertips.
Every year, the rookie lowest on the roster has to scrub the toilet. This year it’s Ronnie. We wait until he’s in to his elbows, then one of the guys sneaks in behind him and snaps a Polaroid with the camera we use to document accident scenes. As soon as the picture develops, we tape it to the white board in the meeting room, where it will remain on display until someone new joins the department and bumps Ronnie up a rung. Later, when Ronnie’s wife arrives, we will make sure she sees the picture, so she knows he is capable of such a thing.
After the dining area is set up, we start cleaning chicken. For the sake of sanitation, we use the medical gloves from the rescue truck, so everybody has blue hands. The chickens arrive plucked and quartered, so “cleaning” basically consists of giving them the once-over and thumbing out the kidneys. This year we went through four hundred and fifty quarters and a bunch of drummies for the kids. The meat is only partially thawed, and halfway through the job my thumb tips ache with cold. I am working beside Bob the One-Eyed Beagle, and because he is a butcher, the cold meat doesn’t bother him at all. We work standing around a rectangular folding table and joke and yap and flick each other with kidney bits.
A couple of the guys on the department have rigged up a barbecue trailer. It’s basically a steel box the size of a small Jacuzzi set on wheels and fitted with a hitch. Tim, one of the designers, backs it around behind the hall, parks it just outside the back door, and levels it with the trailer jack. Every year Tim and the chief argue about how much charcoal is required. And every year it winds up being eight bags, one dumped in each corner, two in the center, and two bags added later. After the application of enough lighter fluid to defoliate Rhode Island, whoever has the charcoal lighter sticking out of his back pocket sets each pile aflame.
While the charcoal burns, we pack the chicken on three grates made from industrial-strength expanded metal. The grates are hinged so they shut like a book. You put the chicken on one side and then fold the other side over and latch the handles. The chicken is squeezed tight so that when the grates are flipped back and forth on their center pivot, the quarters stay put. If we arrange them carefully, we can get forty-five quarters on each grate.
When the briquets are flickering white, Tim uses a shovel to spread them evenly across the bottom of the trailer. Then we lower the grates in place. The chief grabs an industrial-sized lemon pepper shaker and douses all the quarters, and then we settle in for what is always the best part of the day—the tending of the chicken.
For the most part, this is a hen party for roosters.
We have a pretty good chunk of cooking time before the crowd arrives. Some of the guys smoke, some dip a new chew, some nurse a soda, some stuff their hands in their pockets and just stand around. We fiddle with our ball-cap bills and tell stories. There was the time I roared up first on scene with the new brush rig at a cornfield fire and then couldn’t get the pump to start. Finally an untrained bystander reached in and turned off the kill switch. Eric remembers how he and I were making an interior attack on a barn fire when I spun around and hollered, “I think I left my teakettle on!” When he wound up running a tanker shuttle into town, he swung by my house and let himself in the back door. Sure enough, upstairs in the bedroom where I do my writing, the hot plate was on, the kettle was starting to scorch, and the plastic whistle had melted.
The story stick passes around. Ryan fell through the ice on his way to go fishing last winter. He went all the way to the bottom and bounced back to the top without losing his fire pager. Now we call him the human fish finder. Ryan in turn reenacts the night Bob the One-Eyed Beagle bent over to pull up his bunker pants and we all saw the hearts on his boxer shorts. Every now and then flames spring up from the briquets and the chief knocks them down with his trusty squirt bottle. It’s what a fire chief does. At regular intervals, we flip the chicken.
We keep a big steel pot of water boiling off to the side on an LP burner. The pot is filled with gizzards and sliced onions. Every now and then you jab a gizzard, dash it with salt and pepper, and then eat it. It’s hard to wait for it to cool, and you wind up chewing in fast breathy bites.
This year the chief is armed with a digital meat thermometer and he keeps jabbing the chicken. “It ain’t done,” says the chief.
“It’s done,” says Tim.
“Hell if it is!”
“Hell if it ain’t!” And so on.
“Guaran-damn-teeya, first person brings their chicken back ’cause it’s red on the bone, I know whose ass I’m gonna chew.”
We’re already unloading the rack, using steel tongs to snatch the quarters and drop them into insulated coolers lined with butcher paper. The meat is seared with the diamond pattern of the metal grates and you can’t hardly stand not to pick at it. Tim pulls a quarter apart to test it. We all stab our hands in, stripping off pieces. The plain meat tastes so good in the open air. Even better are the bits of chicken skin stuck to the grate. Crispy, greasy, smoked, and tangy with lemon pepper. At this point we’d be happy to take down the signs and eat the whole works ourselves. We pick the steel clean. Then we put on fresh gloves and pack the grates with chicken again. There is the age-old question of why men who won’t heat their own macaroni water will nonetheless hump forth to grunt and wave sharp sticks over meat cooked al fresco. Ours is an emancipated department, recently hovering near a dead-even fifty-fifty distribution of men to women. And yet, elements of the chicken feed tend to break down along the lines of sex. Each member of the department is expected to provide a tray of bars for the dessert table, which is set up against the wall in the space usually occupied by the brush truck. The table is stacked edge to edge with desserts. Not a single one baked by a married man. This is nothing new. When Jimmy Smith joined the department a year after his wife, Brianna, he said it was because he was sick of making brownies. Of all the bachelors on the department, I am the only one who baked his own tray of bars. The other single guys just brought store-bought cookies. Which I might as well have done, as my bars are inedible. The recipe was simple. Oatmeal bars with chocolate frosting. Mix oatmeal with Karo syrup, spread on a pan, bake. Not sure how you screw that up, but I did. The syrup turned so hard it is as if the oatmeal is set in amber. I frosted them anyway. It was like spreading spackle on chipboard. I had to use a cleaver to cut the individual squares, leaning all my weight on the blade and rocking back and forth. Then I plated them under plastic wrap and made a show of putting them on the table. The important thing here isn’t that you make bars or that people like your bars, it’s that your fellow firefighters and auxiliary members see you coming through the door with bars.
I mentioned the need for bars to Anneliese the week prior. She detected my hopeful tone, and did not go for it. “Our relationship,” she said, “has not reached the stage where I make your bars.”
While the second batch of chicken is cooking, I sneak home to straighten up the house in preparation for Amy and Anneliese, even running a vacuum over the living room rug. When I get back to the hall the rescue truck is just returning from a medical call. I didn’t hear the pager over the noise of the vacuum. I make the mistake of saying so. “Why are you vacuuming, Mikey!?” asks the Beagle.
Big laughs all around.
As soon as the second batch of chicken is done, I sneak home one more time to shower and put on a clean department T-shirt. When I get back this time, the brush truck is just returning. This time I missed a small grass fire. The pager went off while I had my head under the shower. Remarking my second missed call in a row, the Beagle says, “Mikey, yer gettin’ all tuned up!” More laughs.
We set up the serving benches. Napkins, plastic silverware, and Styrofoam trays to the right. Then buns and butter. The chief’s wife has made gigantic tubs of cole slaw and potato salad, which we’ll transfer to serving bowls and ladle out with ice-cream scoops. We have two Crock-Pots brimming with pork and b
eans. The chicken in the insulated coolers cools if you flap the lid, so we serve it from Nesco roasters. The Nesco roaster is as essential to community functions as folding chairs and willing citizens. It is the centerpiece of family reunions and church suppers and graduation parties. I like the older version best, all overbuilt and sturdy, a cross between a chamber pot and a bathtub, an enameled white Buick of an appliance. Lately here they’ve sort of leaned out the design, adding contemporary graphics and a ventilated handle, and I intend to write them a letter. Much of the comfort in the classic Nesco roaster derives from the old-school sturdy look. It is the tugboat of comfort food, and should not be fiddled with.
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